Synthesia Talk

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There probably isn't a good one-size-fits-all answer, I'm afraid. Everyone learns at a different speed. The method, style, level of focus, level of dedication, and a dozen other factors also play a huge role in that speed as well.

Take a look at some of the other topics in this section of the forum. There is a lot of good, inspirational advice that can guide you on a path to having fun and staying motivated while you work toward achieving realistic goals.

I type at over 100 wpm, and I guess that's an advantage when learning to play the piano (control of fingers), and there's bound to be very large differences between individuals concerning how fast they learn to play a song, yet I'm curious if there is any sort of 'standard' that people deviate from.

LikeARollingStone wrote:yet I'm curious if there is any sort of 'standard' that people deviate from.

To draw a parallel to language learning. These are the 'standard' number of hours required to reach a given leven: A2, 180–200; B1, 350–400; B2, 500–600; C1, 700–800, and C2, 1,000–1,200. Although induvidal differances are large.

Some get to B1 in only 100 hours, others use much more than 500, others spend more than a thousand hours and still doesn't pass the test. Yet it's meaningful to say that it takes 'some hundred' hours to get to B1, and to underscore that individual differences are significant.

There is a lot of emphasis on slow, perfect practice, with hands together early on in the article. That possibly suggests that Synthesia should start a piece at a slow speed and not allow the speed to be increased until a nearly perfect performance is achieved at the slow speed. It might also suggest that as soon as there is some evidence of single hand competence, the use of two hand practice should be strongly encouraged; perhaps an "Are you sure you want to do just one hand?" dialog box?

This brings up the question of how slow should you start? I don't think I ever go below 50% in rhythm practice. I go to melody practice if I can't play a song at 50% speed in rhythm practice. My thinking is that once you get below a certain speed you lose the flow of the song. I take the approach that a song I can't pretty quickly learn to play at 50% speed is too hard for my current level of skill.

How slow do others go? Is anyone able to learn a song in a reasonable length of time if they initially have to start at something like 10% speed?

Could Synthesia look at how you are doing at a slow speed and make the suggestion that a song is too hard for you? Or, if you are doing really well, that the song is too easy to improve your skill level?

Of course, this "taskmaster" mode would need to be something that could be turned off by those that aren't interested in following this approach for learning to play piano. Or probably better, something that could be turned on by those who do want this.

Great ideas and an interesting article, Jim Henry. I have actually found much of the same to be true for typing: if you use «hardcore» mode where one error means game over, and use such games to eliminate errors, it will have a bigger effect on speed than trying to set a new speed record in practice. Perfect practice makes perfect, the saying should be. When it comes to typing I have a matrix of some fifteen various 'errors' and I identity why it didn't go well, and work on the bottleneck, constantly driving up wpm and accuracy. What I miss in touch games is a graph of accuracy, so I can quickly see if I have improved since last week. A graph of accuracy would be super to get in Synthesia as well.